Shelley Part 9

If a final word were needed to utter the unutterable sense of waste excited in us by Sh.e.l.ley's premature absorption into the mystery of the unknown, we might find it in the last lines of his own _Alastor_:--

Art and eloquence, And all the shows o' the world, are frail and vain To weep a loss that turns their light to shade.

It is a woe "too deep for tears," when all Is reft at once, when some surpa.s.sing spirit, Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves Those who remain behind nor sobs nor groans.

The pa.s.sionate tumult of a clinging hope; But pale despair and cold tranquillity, Nature's vast frame, the web of human things, Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.

APPENDIX.

(_To replace pages 79-83 in text._)

That Sh.e.l.ley, early in 1814, had formed no intention of abandoning his wife is certain; for he was re-married to her on the 24th of March (eight days after the letter I have just quoted) at St. George's, Hanover Square.

This ratification of the Scotch marriage was no doubt meant to place the legitimacy of a possible heir beyond all question. Yet, if we may base conjecture upon "Stanzas, April, 1814," which undoubtedly refer to his relations with the Boinville family, it seems that in the very month after this new ceremony Sh.e.l.ley found the difficulties of his wedded life intolerable. He had not, however, lost his affection for Harriet. He still sought to recover her confidence and kindness. In spite of his wife's apparent coldness and want of intellectual sympathy, in spite of his own increasing alienation from the atmosphere in which she now lived, he still approached her with the feelings of a suitor and a lover. This is proved beyond all doubt by the pathetic stanzas "To Harriet: May, 1814," which have only recently been published. I may add that these verses exist in Harriet's own autograph, whence I infer that she, on her side, was not indifferent to the emotion they express.[35] Sh.e.l.ley begins with this apostrophe:

Thy look of love has power to calm The stormiest pa.s.sion of my soul; Thy gentle words are drops of balm In life's too bitter bowl.

He then immediately adds that his cruellest grief is to have known and lost "those choicest blessings"; Harriet is proving by her coldness that she repays his most devoted love with scorn. Nevertheless he will appeal to her better nature:

Be thou, then, one among mankind Whose heart is harder not for state, Thou only virtuous, gentle, kind, Amid a world of hate; And by a slight endurance seal A fellow-being's lasting weal.

The next stanza paints a moving picture of his own wretchedness, and beseeches her, before it is too late, to avert the calamity of an open rupture:

In mercy let him not endure The misery of a fatal cure.

She has been yielding to false counsels and obeying the impulse of feelings which represent not her real and n.o.bler, but her artificial and lower self:

O trust for once no erring guide!

Bid the remorseless feeling flee; 'Tis malice, 'tis revenge, 'tis pride, 'Tis anything but thee; O deign a n.o.bler pride to prove, And pity if thou canst not love.

Whatever opinion the student of Sh.e.l.ley's history may form regarding his previous and his subsequent conduct, due weight must always be given to the accent of sincerity, of pleading sorrow, of ingenuous self-humiliation, in these touching lines. It must also be remembered that Harriet, although she treasured them and copied them in her own handwriting, apparently turned a deaf ear to their appeal, and that it was not until several weeks of solitude and misery had pa.s.sed that Sh.e.l.ley finally sought the "fatal cure" of separation by flinging himself into the arms of Mary G.o.dwin.

We may now affirm with confidence that in the winter and spring of 1814 an estrangement had gradually been growing up between Sh.e.l.ley and Harriet.

Her more commonplace nature, subsiding into worldliness, began to weary of his enthusiasms, which at the same epoch expanded somewhat unhealthily under the influences of the Boinville family. That intimacy brought into painful prominence whatever was jarring and repugnant to him in his home.

While divided in this way between domesticity which had become distasteful, and the society of friends with whom he found scope for his most romantic outpourings of sensibility, Sh.e.l.ley fell suddenly and pa.s.sionately in love with G.o.dwin's daughter, Mary. He made her acquaintance first perhaps in May or at the beginning of June. Peac.o.c.k, who lived on terms of the closest familiarity with him at this period, must deliver his testimony as to the overwhelming nature of the new attachment:--"Nothing that I ever read in tale or history could present a more striking image of a sudden, violent, irresistible, uncontrollable pa.s.sion, than that under which I found him labouring when, at his request, I went up from the country to call on him in London. Between his old feelings towards Harriet, _from whom he was not then separated_, and his new pa.s.sion for Mary, he showed in his looks, in his gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind 'suffering, like a little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection.' His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. He caught up a bottle of laudanum, and said, 'I never part from this.'"

Mary G.o.dwin was then a girl of sixteen, "fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look," to quote Hogg's description of her, as she first appeared before him on the 8th or 9th of June, 1814. With her freedom from prejudice, her tense and high-wrought sensibility, her acute intellect, enthusiasm for ideas, and vivid imagination, Mary G.o.dwin was naturally a fitter companion for Sh.e.l.ley than the good Harriet, however beautiful. How he plighted his new troth, and won the hand of her who was destined to be his companion for life, may best be told in Lady Sh.e.l.ley's words:--

"His anguish, his isolation, his difference from other men, his gifts of genius and eloquent enthusiasm, made a deep impression on G.o.dwin's daughter Mary, now a girl of sixteen, who had been accustomed to hear Sh.e.l.ley spoken of as something rare and strange. To her, as they met one eventful day in St. Pancras Churchyard, by her mother's grave, Bysshe, in burning words, poured forth the tale of his wild past--how he had suffered, how he had been misled, and how, if supported by her love, he hoped in future years to enrol his name with the wise and good who had done battle for their fellow-men, and been true through all adverse storms to the cause of humanity. Unhesitatingly, she placed her hand in his, and linked her fortune with his own; and most truthfully, as the remaining portions of these Memorials will prove, was the pledge of both redeemed.

The theories in which the daughter of the authors of _Political Justice_, and of the _Rights of Woman_, had been educated, spared her from any conflict between her duty and her affection. For she was the child of parents whose writings had had for their object to prove that marriage was one among the many inst.i.tutions which a new era in the history of mankind was about to sweep away. By her father, whom she loved--by the writings of her mother, whom she had been taught to venerate--these doctrines had been rendered familiar to her mind. It was therefore natural that she should listen to the dictates of her own heart, and willingly unite her fate with one who was so worthy of her love."

The separation from Harriet, which actually took place about the middle of July, was not arranged by mutual consent, as some authorities a.s.sert, so much as by Sh.e.l.ley's deliberate repudiation of his partner. Yet she must be held to some degree responsible for bringing about the catastrophe by her own imprudent behaviour. At an uncertain date in the summer she went to Bath, leaving her husband in London or its neighbourhood. Although he was now becoming convinced that their union could not be prolonged, he continued to correspond with her regularly until early in July. A silence of four days then alarmed her so much that she wrote upon the 6th in great anxiety to Mr. Hookham, begging to be informed of Sh.e.l.ley's doings. On the 14th they met again at his request in London. What pa.s.sed on this occasion is not known; but it seems tolerably certain that he informed her of his firm resolve to part from her. On the 28th of that month he departed secretly for the Continent with Mary G.o.dwin, who had consented to share his fortunes. It must be added that he pa.s.sed through a crisis of intense suffering and excitement, bordering on madness, before he finally determined to exchange the refrigerated and uncongenial Harriet for the impa.s.sioned and sympathetic Mary.

That Sh.e.l.ley has to bear the burden of this act of separation from his first wife seems quite clear; nor can I discover anything to justify his conduct, according to the commonly received opinions of the world, except incompatibility of aims and interests in 1814 between him and the woman he so recklessly married in 1811. His own peculiar justification is to be found in his avowed opinions on the subject of marriage--opinions which Harriet knew well and professed to share, and of which he had recently made ample confession in the notes to _Queen Mab_. Men and women in general, those whom Sh.e.l.ley was wont to style "the vulgar," will still agree with Lord Eldon in regarding those opinions as dangerous to society.

But it would be unfair, while condemning them as frankly as Sh.e.l.ley professed them, to blame him also because he did not conform to the opposite code of morals, for which he frequently expressed extreme abhorrence, and which he stigmatized, however wrongly, as the source of the worst social vices.

What is left of Harriet's history may be briefly told. She remained in correspondence with her husband, who showed himself always anxious for her material and moral welfare. At Bath, upon the 30th of November, 1814, she gave birth to Sh.e.l.ley's second child, Charles Bysshe, who eventually died in 1826. She seems to have formed other connexions at a later date, which proved unfortunate; and on the 9th of November (?) 1816, she committed suicide by drowning in the Serpentine. It should be added that, until just before the end, she continued to live under her father's protection. The distance of time between July, 1814, and November, 1816, and the new ties formed by Harriet in the interval, prove that there was no immediate relation between Sh.e.l.ley's abandonment of his wife and her suicide. She had always entertained the thought of self-destruction, as Hogg, who is no adverse witness in her case, has amply recorded. It may, indeed, be permitted us to suppose that, finding herself for the second time unhappy in her love, she reverted to a long-since cherished scheme, and cut the knot of life and all its troubles.

So far as this is possible, I have attempted to narrate the most painful episode in Sh.e.l.ley's life as I conceive it to have occurred, without extenuation and without condemnation. But one important point connected with the chief incident still remains to be examined in detail.

Mr. Dowden says: "From an a.s.surance that she (Harriet) had ceased to love him, Sh.e.l.ley had pa.s.sed to a conviction that she had given her heart to another, and had linked her life to his."[36] This statement he repeats without qualification: "He had left her, believing she was unfaithful to him."[37] The doc.u.ments which Mr. Dowden quotes to establish Sh.e.l.ley's belief in Harriet's unfaithfulness before the separation are three in number.[38] First, a letter from Sh.e.l.ley to his second wife, dated January 11, 1817. Secondly, a letter from G.o.dwin to Mr. W. T. Baxter, dated May 12, 1817. Thirdly, a note appended by Miss Clairmont to transcripts from her mother's letters, made some time after 1832. I have enumerated these in chronological order, because their greater or less remoteness from the year 1814 considerably affects their value as evidence regarding Sh.e.l.ley's belief at that period.

It must be borne in mind that Harriet committed suicide in November, 1816, and very soon after this event the Westbrook family began a suit in Chancery with the object of depriving Sh.e.l.ley of the custody of his two children by her. On the 11th of January, 1817, then, Sh.e.l.ley wrote to Mary: "I learn just now from G.o.dwin that he has evidence that Harriet was unfaithful to me _four months_ before I left England with you. If we can succeed in establishing this, our connexion will receive an additional sanction, and plea be overborne."[39] As a matter of fact, when the pleadings began, he did not establish this, nor did he allude to the matter in the memorandum he drew up of his case.[40] G.o.dwin writes upon the 12th of May: "The late Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley has turned out to be a woman of great levity. I know from unquestionable authority, wholly unconnected with Sh.e.l.ley (though I cannot with propriety be quoted for this), that she had proved herself unfaithful to her husband before their separation." On the strength of these two pa.s.sages, the pith and kernel of which is that G.o.dwin, some months after Harriet's death, credited a tale told him by an unknown person, which he repeated to Sh.e.l.ley, we are asked to suppose that Sh.e.l.ley in July, 1814, two and a half years earlier, was convinced of Harriet's infidelity. But Miss Clairmont has still to be heard. She, writing at some uncertain date subsequently to 1832, and therefore at least eighteen years after the separation, recorded that: "He (Sh.e.l.ley) succeeded in persuading her (Mary) by declaring that Harriet did not really care for him; that she was in love with a Major Ryan; and the child she would have was certainly not his. This Mary told me herself, adding that this justified his having another attachment." When we come to examine Miss Clairmont's reminiscences, we find them untrustworthy in so many instances that her evidence carries no weight.[41] In the second place it is unquestioned and unquestionable that Sh.e.l.ley firmly believed the second child he had by Harriet to be his own. He announced the boy's birth to his friends, had him named Charles Bysshe, used him in his efforts to raise money, and pa.s.sionately claimed him when Harriet's relatives refused to give him up. Yet we are invited to accept the memorandum of an inaccurate woman, penned at least eighteen years after the event, and including one palpable and serious misstatement, as proof that Sh.e.l.ley judged his first wife unfaithful before he eloped with Mary.

No one contends that Harriet actually broke her marriage vow before the separation. What Professor Dowden asks us to believe is that _Sh.e.l.ley thought_ she was untrue to him at that period. Miss Clairmont's evidence I reject as valueless. At the most she only reports something which Sh.e.l.ley is supposed to have said to Mary with the object of persuading her to elope with him, and which his subsequent conduct with regard to his son Charles Bysshe contradicted. The true inference to be drawn from Sh.e.l.ley's and G.o.dwin's far more important letters in 1817 is that it was not until the latter date that the suspicion of Harriet's guilt before the separation arose. This suspicion did not, however, harden into certainty, nor was it found capable of verification; else why did not Sh.e.l.ley use the fact, as he proposed, in order to strengthen his case against the Westbrooks? I admit that his letter to Southey in 1820 supports the view that, having once begun to entertain the suspicion, he never afterwards abandoned it.[42]

If now we turn to contemporary records between the dates, June, 1814, and May, 1815 (at which time Harriet disappears from our ken), we find no intimation either in Mary's or Miss Clairmont's diary, or in Sh.e.l.ley's words and writings, or in the conduct of the Sh.e.l.ley-G.o.dwin set, that Harriet was believed to have broken faith so early with her husband. When Sh.e.l.ley in the summer of 1814 sought to lower her in the eyes of Mary G.o.dwin, he did so by hinting that she only cared for his money and his prospects.[43] Mary talks about her "insulting selfishness," calls her "nasty woman," and exhibits a good deal of resentment at Sh.e.l.ley's welcome to his son and heir by her (December 6, 1814).[44] The pained reiteration of the words _wife_ in her diary on this occasion proves how bitterly she felt her own position as _mistress_. Sh.e.l.ley invited Harriet to establish herself in the neighbourhood of Mary and himself. She was visited in London by the whole party. But while they continued upon awkward terms of half familiarity and mutual irritation, nothing by word or act implied a knowledge of her previous infidelity. What is further to the point is that Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley, in her novel of _Lodore_, which Professor Dowden rightly judges to be a history of Sh.e.l.ley's relation to Harriet, painted a wife's gradual alienation from her husband without hinting at misconduct.[45]

In conclusion, I am bound to express my opinion that nothing now produced from the Sh.e.l.ley archives very materially alters the view of the case at which sane and cautious critics arrived before these were placed in the hands of his last biographer. We ought, moreover, to remember that Sh.e.l.ley, of all men, would have most resented anything like an appeal to popular opinions regarding the marriage tie. His firm conviction was that when affection ceased between a married couple, or when new loves had irrevocably superseded old ones, the connexion ought to be broken. In his own case he felt that Harriet's emotion towards him had changed, while an irresistible pa.s.sion for another woman had suddenly sprung up in his heart. Upon these grounds, after undergoing a terrible contention of the soul, he forced on the separation to which his first wife unwillingly submitted.

THE END.